Setting up a first meeting
To follow up on Where to meet the first time after chatting online and Taking things from erotic emails to in-person hookups, I want to talk a bit about the logistics of arranging the first meeting, taking the conversation from online to in-person.
The first thing to keep in mind, guys, is that you want to make it easy for her. If you can go to her neighborhood, so much the better. If you can go to her favorite restaurant or coffee shop, great! Putting up hurdles, like difficult places to meet, or very particular times, is not ideal. If I'm very interested in someone, I'm willing to go out of my way, but if I'm kind of on the edge and he's making it difficult for us to meet, I'll probably throw in the towel.
There was one guy I exchanged a total of maybe 200 emails with -- mostly one-liners -- over the course of a month. He looked attractive, we were into more or less the same things and seemed to be on the same page about what we were looking for -- but he was impossible to schedule with. I tend to be pretty busy, so scheduling ahead a few days or a week is often the only way to guarantee you get a slot in my schedule. He was more of a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants kind of guy who didn't want to plan that far ahead.*
That meant that our only possible options were those rare occasions when I had a prior plan fall through on short notice. Okay, fine, that just means waiting a while, which is no problem for me, though I have found that this decreases the likelihood of a meeting actually happening, after a point. So he would drop me an email in the evenings on nights he had free (almost all of them) to see if I was around. If I was, I would respond, and he would commence trying to talk me into going to his house. I had, of course, explained how I prefer to meet in public, but he figured that hormones would convince me otherwise. (They didn't.)
Ultimately, this guy seemed both lazy and pathetic. It appeared that he wasn't getting any, wasn't willing to do much work to get any, and was holding out for something better, which obviously wasn't coming along, oddly enough.
Another thing about setting up a first meeting is this: don't put a lot of pressure on. No matter how hot your email exchange is, the first meeting is the real test. I hate it when a guy talks like it's a no-brainer that we're going to have as much bang in person as we do online, because there's no guarantee that that's the case, and it makes me cranky to have to put on the brakes. Being cautious is to your benefit, too, because, believe it or not, you might meet and decide you don't want to do her, in which case, backpedalling can be awkward.
Remember to exchange phone numbers before heading out to meet. You never know when traffic is going to suck and you or she will run late. It's nice to know that in such a contingency, you can let each other know that you're not standing the other up, just running late.
* A side note about this not-planning-ahead feature: After a couple of weeks, when it became clear that not planning ahead wasn't working well, I took this to mean that he didn't want to commit an evening to me, perhaps on the chance that some better offer would come up between now and then. Needless to say, if a woman gets this sense from you -- rightly or wrongly -- you're pretty much done as far as actually getting her into bed.
